WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION THERE have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly. than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things in the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagina William Blake and ation. tion, but that they 'made their souls' by the Imaginlistening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of some one of the great poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those. our fathers kept for the beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe with our lips, we believe Ideas of Good and Evil. with our hearts that beautiful things, as He had learned from Jacob Boehme The reason, from the observations of the senses, us William Blake and ation. binds us to mortality because it binds the Imaginus to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live -lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most holy-and this was a scandalous paradox in his time-and man shall enter eternity borne upon their wings. And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to Vala, had he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first faint washes of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time and to our time. The sensations of this Ideas of Good and jon foolish body,' this 'phantom of the earth and water,' were in themselves but half-living things, 'vegetative' things, but passion that eternal glory' made them a part of the body of God. This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time, for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility. Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a better time-Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say that they have troubled the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world, instead of believing that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly on the Divine hand.' But when though the one reads Blake, it is as |